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Long before Ole Miss announced the hiring of Lane Kiffin as its football coach Saturday, the communications arm of the athletic department in Oxford had a plan.

Its not enough these days to simply push news via your social channels.

No, in todays day and age of social media, marketing and communications departments strive for creative and eye-catching ways to deliver their messages.

So, if Kiffin being hired was one of the top news stories of the weekend in the SEC, then the way Ole Miss delivered that message was a close second.

The days leading up to the announcement were filled with reports the former Florida Atlantic head coach was headed to Arkansas.

On Friday night reports shifted their focus to Oxford.

By then, the social media team at Ole Miss was ready. On Saturday, it was clear Kiffin was headed to Ole Miss, and the timing of the announcement was to take place after Kiffins Owls faced UAB for the Conference USA title.

What came next was a well-orchestrated and planned execution of a series of tweets that kept Rebels fans wanting more. The tweets were patient, clever with just the right hint of a tease, leaving people wanting more. And, for good measure, the tweets struck the right chord with pop culture references.

Its always a balancing act with major announcements, Ole Miss associate athletic director for football Kyle Campbell told AL.com. In the industry today, an announcement can often come immediately after the decision, which leaves little prep time for content. As a result, you have to hedge your bets sometimes and start working on graphics, videos and press releases before a final decision has been made.

As indications started to lean more toward coach Kiffin late Friday, our staff began a creative brainstorm that went round the clock until Saturdays announcement. Once we got the final confirmation on Saturday that the announcement would come at the conclusion of the Conference USA Championship Game, our team laid out a content schedule to generate the most excitement while still complying with the agreed upon communications timeline.

The staff included Micah Ginn, Stewart Pirani, Seth Austin, Will Day and Scott Wyant from the productions team; Brad Sheffield, Adam Kuffner and Alex Sims from the communications team; and Paris Buchanan and Jason List from the marketing staff. In short, it was a group effort.

At 2:28 p.m. Saturday, it started. It was a simple tweet of a GIF, showing white smoke. The white smoke, of course, is a tip of the cap to a papal conclave in which a new pope has been chosen. In this case, Ole Miss had a new coach, but no information was given.

We use the digital platform Slack in the daily communication between our Communications, Productions and Marketing units, and it allows us to be in constant ideation mode and spitball creative content, said Campbell, who added it was known within the department the Kiffin deal was done at that point. The white smoke was an idea that materialized from our group discussions Friday night, and as plans became more concrete, we landed on that as the first content to tease the announcement.

Forty minutes later, Ole Miss tweeted out a second GIF of a steam locomotive flying down the tracks. For the uninitiated, it was the first clue of who Ole Miss coach would be. The reference was to the Lane Train, a nod to Kiffin.

It was definitely hard, Campbell said of not just announcing the news. We have a passionate, motivated staff, and we want our content to be bold and setting the tone on social media. However, they are also professionals, and when a situation is fluid, they understand to show restraint until the appropriate time.

Still, the tweet has more than 1.6 thousand likes. Ole Miss had the football-watching social media audience on the hook with its first two tweets. Surely, the announcement was coming next, right?

Not yet.

The social media team had one more tease in store, which not only went after Ole Miss football fan base but also after fans of one of the most trending topics on social media over the past few weeks: Baby Yoda.

Baby Yoda is the younger version of the famed Star Wars character, which has become a world-wide hit. The adorable character of The Mandalorian, a Disney+ series, has taken the country by storm. Ole Miss social media team, in a brilliant move, used Baby Yoda and The Mandalorian for the final tease of the reveal.

The social media team synced a popular scene from the show with Quad City DJs 1996 hip hop hit Cmon N Ride it (The Train), yet another reference to the Lane Train. Fifty-eight minutes later, the third communication from Ole Miss was tweeted.

The video took social media by storm, being viewed more than 95,000 times.

Stewart Pirani, who is in his final days on our productions team before beginning a new job in the MLS, left us with that little gift, Campbell said. We have been extremely blessed with creative minds like Stewart in our department, and they bring so many different perspectives and talents to the table. We have content creators that can produce the long-form storytelling that has been so successful on our weekly television show The Season on ESPNU, and at the same time, they can generate funny shorts like the Yoda clip that can quickly go viral on social media.

Fewer than 30 minutes later, the official announcement was tweeted.

By Sunday, Ole Miss official announcement had been viewed more than 1.1 million times.

All of our content was very well received, Campbell said. The social media discussion surrounding coach Kiffin started to really bubble up Friday night, and I think our creative teasers and hype video on Saturday helped further drive the excitement of our fans.

Mark Heim is a sports reporter for The Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Mark_Heim.

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How Ole Miss won Internet with Lane Kiffin, Baby Yoda and The Mandalorian - AL.com